the young man. At the time, Lowe was unaware that the student, upset over a failed romantic relationship, had recently been diagnosed with depression. They wrestled around the classroom, clanging on blackboards, and ended up in the hallway banging against the metal lockers. Miraculously, Lowe was able to grab the shotgun while keeping the young man in a strong grip. Lowe breathlessly tossed the shotgun to another teacher while screaming at him to call 911.
Putting the young man on the floor while waiting for the police to come, the student was agitated and upset, tearfully shouting, “Nobody cares about me!”
Keanon Lowe did the unthinkable.
He looked into his eyes and said, “I care about you.” Lowe continued saying, “I do bro, That's why I'm here, I got you buddy.” As the police swarmed in and took the student into custody, Lowe was spared. The student was arrested and later released to a hospital for mental health treatment.
Fear. Keanon Lowe used courage and caring to transform his fear into the energy of compassion.
Fear and Trauma Affect Learning
According to the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative (TLPI), a collaboration of Massachusetts Advocates for Children and Harvard Law School,
trauma resulting from overwhelming experiences has the power to disturb a student's development of foundations for learning. It can undermine the development of language and communication skills, thwart the establishment of a coherent sense of self, compromise the ability to attend to classroom tasks and instructions, interfere with the ability to organize and remember new information, and hinder the grasping of cause-and-effect relationships – all of which are necessary to process information effectively. Trauma can also interfere with the capacity for creative play, which is one of the ways children learn how to cope with the problems of everyday life.
Not only is academic performance hindered, but classroom behavior and peer to peer relationships are negatively impacted as well.
The trauma of childhood abuse can have long-term effects that continue to shape your sense of self and the world around you in adulthood. Often, one of the most tragic consequences of such trauma is its impact on your interpersonal relationships; by disrupting healthy development in your formative years, childhood abuse can deeply compromise your ability to form and maintain the healthy bonds that nurture us throughout our lives.
Childhood trauma is a dangerous or frightening event that a child between the ages of infancy and 18 years of age experiences personally or witnesses. Three hours in a hallway with a textbook over your head while not knowing if a tornado is going to destroy your school at any given moment, possibly injuring you or taking your life is most certainly a traumatic event for anyone, especially a child who is away from their parents as it all happens. It makes me wish that districts had just cancelled schools that day.
In the 1950s during the early stages of the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear bombs in the United States had its citizens in a panic, across the country school children would scurry under desks for duck-and-cover drills just like the tornado safety procedure mentioned above. Years later, surveys of children from this revealed that almost 60% of them still had nightmares about atomic bombs (Pinkser 2019). During the 1980s and 1990s reports of children being kidnapped dominated the airways and with US parents and their children frequently watching television, a 1987 poll found that the most common fear of children was to be kidnapped (Allen 1998). Paula Fass, a historian at UC Berkeley wrote a book about child abductions, Kidnapped. She commented that for most kids, “It didn't seem that there were any protected places” (Pinkser 2019). In reality, the fear of kidnapping by a stranger in 1987 was low, because then like now, on average fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted in the United States since 2010, according to the FBI (Reuters Staff 2019).
School shootings today create similar fears and feelings for students and their parents. There is a constant 24-hour exposure to news across a variety of platforms. Smartphones capture terror in real-time and are easily shared in case one missed it. Between actual exposure and drills for a shooter, children report that the majority of US students worry that a shooting could happen at their school, and so do their parents (Graff 2018). In How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker writes, “Fear is an emotion of anticipation that is triggered when a situation that is at risk for our safety and or the safety of others is perceived. Emotions serve a variety of functions. Our desires and beliefs are information for our brain.” He continues to say that, “Fear is the emotion that motivated our ancestors to cope with the dangers they were likely to face” (Pinker 1999).
As important as fear is, surprisingly, we don't experience it as often as we might think (Whalen 2007). Think of how many times you have literally been “scared to death” not just afraid. It's probably not that many. Our experience has been that when people feel afraid in a situation, they are not always in touch with their own feelings of fear and may act defensively or angrily. For example, when we see a young person who is frequently agitating others and engaging in behavior that some would consider as aggressive or taunting, we see pain. Our first inclination is not to label, judge, or punish the behavior but to question, “What is driving it?”
Fear as a Teacher
The need to look beneath aggressive behavior and understand the underlying motives became apparent when I (Janet) was working as a part-time psychiatrist at Rikers Island and assigned to work with male juveniles. Rikers, at the time, was the largest jail in the United States. It spans almost 414 acres between the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn.
Stopping at the first of many checkpoints is an intimidating process. You are held captive by a non-smiling officer, and asked for proof of identification, including an up-to-date car registration. Small talk is usually not reciprocated and any attempts at banal chatter is usually met with stone cold silence. I attended a thoroughly chilling orientation about how to think and act while a visitor, working at Rikers Island, making me worry if my presence there was worth it. Honestly there were many days when I wondered why I was. But deep down I knew.
Over my career, I have always worked with folks who have been marginalized. Being at Riker's taught me about the impact of trauma on behavior, and how trauma contributes to feelings of fear, anger, and hopelessness. My role, I would learn, was to unleash the individual potential and freeing power, for individuals involved in criminal justice to acknowledge past trauma and openly speak about their pain. Many of these patients of mine had never disclosed their pain, suffering, and trauma to anyone. Their behavior patterns would be labeled as criminal deviance without adequate understanding of the underlying root causes.
As I was working there part-time, I was assigned to different buildings, never knowing where I would end up for the day. The first time that I worked with the male adolescents, I was floored by how much I connected with each young man. They were mostly Brown and Black and would shift uncomfortably while waiting for our session, warily watching each other. Expecting negative attitudes, they had me at “Yes Ma'am” and “No Ma'am” while politely answering my questions. Their easy willingness to open up and talk was both compelling and heartbreaking. Telling me their life stories helped to make sense of their trauma as their words formed a consistent narrative about youth, abuse, low-resources, and peer pressure. Many were in for violent offenses, and I quickly learned that knowing a charge without knowing their past life experiences was meaningless. My job was to assist them in making sense of their own trauma and for them to relate it to their behavior. Hurt people hurt people and most of these young men had suffered emotional and/or physical abuse from someone in, or close to, their own household. Noticing my pain, I'll never forget what one Correction Officer said to me. He told me, “Doc, don't fall for their lies, these little m***********s will smile at you then kill you.” His words caught me off guard. I never saw these young men as threats to me; I was too busy trying not to be a threat to them.
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